> Indoor and especially vertical farming might be worthwhile in some edge cases but all the fancy Startup babble does conveniently ignore that you lose access to thousands of dollars worth of free services provided by nature: irrigation, fertility, pest control, sun light for crying out loud.
Fertilization is no longer a given, since we've been pretty darn successful at killing off all the bees and other pollinators with pesticides or by consolidating fields to such enormous sizes that the meager strips of greenery that remain at their borders cannot support insect life.
Same for pest control - ploughing kills a lot of the ground-based animals dealing with pests, and the lack of food plus pesticides killed a lot of insect and avian species that served as pest control.
Irrigation is no longer a given as well... yes, California has massive amounts of water right now, but the years before that were droughts, and that's a problem everywhere for the last decades or so. We managed to deplete groundwater reserves to a shocking degree, and wide swaths of land have dried out to a degree that the soil collapsed and compacted, leaving it permanently unable to accept and store prior water levels to be accessible for plants.
We've thoroughly fucked up the planet, so thoroughly that we don't have a choice left any more but to explore efficient and scalable ways of recreating nature.
There are plenty of great projects and commercial regenerative farms that have demonstrated that exploited and degraded soils can be made productive again in a matter of years with little to no external inputs in terms of fertilizer and water. The Work of Ernst Götschl (syntropic agriculture) comes to mind in tropical climates, or Mark Shepard in mid-west US.
Fertilization is no longer a given, since we've been pretty darn successful at killing off all the bees and other pollinators with pesticides or by consolidating fields to such enormous sizes that the meager strips of greenery that remain at their borders cannot support insect life.
Same for pest control - ploughing kills a lot of the ground-based animals dealing with pests, and the lack of food plus pesticides killed a lot of insect and avian species that served as pest control.
Irrigation is no longer a given as well... yes, California has massive amounts of water right now, but the years before that were droughts, and that's a problem everywhere for the last decades or so. We managed to deplete groundwater reserves to a shocking degree, and wide swaths of land have dried out to a degree that the soil collapsed and compacted, leaving it permanently unable to accept and store prior water levels to be accessible for plants.
We've thoroughly fucked up the planet, so thoroughly that we don't have a choice left any more but to explore efficient and scalable ways of recreating nature.